Adelante: Means "moving forward" and "go on ahead." Sterling's Latino Mural follows the history of a blue-collar community moving
together from past to future: arriving from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Texas
since the early 1900s, working, building, organizing, celebrating, learning, and
maintaining its spiritual traditions, in sum "moving forward."

The community pages of Adelante
website show everyday activities that are reflected in the historical panels
of the Latino Mural, such as COMMUNITY & WORK.

AGRICULTURE

Today, high school kids join
farmworkers in "detasseling" the hybrid corn in August. Planting,
weeding, harvesting, and foodpacking were labor-intensive jobs that drew
immigrants and migrants into the fields of the Midwest. Adelante
shows the long rows of Midwestern corn, a mother and child working in the fields, a farmworker with a box of
cucumbers, and the antique green John Deere tractor manufactured in
Illinois.

Northwestern Steel & Wire,
hardware manufacturers, and the railroads attracted Latino workers since before
WW I. Workers went on strike and formed a union in the mid-1930s,
successfully joining the United Steel Workers of America by 1937 -- the same
year that the electric "mini-mill" furnace modernized steel and wire
production in Sterling [depicted in Adelante
mural 2nd panel].

Northwestern
closed their doors and dismissed about 1,400 workers in May 2001. Everyone
has been talking about the future: Will another company buy out the
mill? What will happen to workers close to retirement? How will the
Steelworkers' Union local do now that one of their major employers is
gone? By Spring 2002, negotiations were moving forward swiftly to annex
mill land to the city as part of an investment plan to re-open the mill under
new ownership.

THE RAILROAD
- UNION PACIFIC THEN & NOW

Adelante's first panel
commemorates the arrival of Latino immigrants by train, by car, and on foot. Railroad lines
running from Chicago to Iowa and Nebraska helped develop Sterling as a
manufacturing center on the non-navigable Rock River. Mexican and Mexican
American labor helped build and run the Union Pacific Railroad yesterday and
today.

Photos show an engine in the
Northwestern yard on Wallace Street in the 1960s, Sterling workers
re-constructing the unique "diamond" crossing in Rochelle, IL, and a
modern Union Pacific engine about to pass under the Cesar Chavez Blvd
(12th St / G Street) bridge: